. . . despair, is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt.+++(5)+++
—J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
It is with a certain wonder and curiosity that I look back on what was written above. I sometimes had the feeling, while writing it, of an affinity with the proverbial old lady who is supposed to have said, on one occasion, “How do I know what I think until I hear what I say?” I comfort myself with the thought that I can scarcely have been the first writer who learned what he thought only when he had looked at what he had written. But such is the case; and I find it necessary to review what I have done before offering any comments on it.
I see that in the first part of the book I have recorded, however primitively, my reasons for decisively rejecting any and all suggestions that mankind might be perfectible. This rejection, I found, placed certain limits on hopes, but was no cause for despair.
I went on, then, to offer what many will regard as a no less primitive concept of religious faith. I did this, not with the idea that this concept ought to be in any way compelling or authoritative for anyone else, but simply as a means of allaying the curiosity of any who might wonder whether there was a religious basis for any of the judgments brought forward in the remainder of the book.
Having done this, I proceeded to give my view of the nature of government, as an unavoidable component of human affairs, and also of politics, as an equally unavoidable concomitant of all governmental activity. I tried to make it clear that I do not blame those who participate in either the governmental or the political process. On the contrary, I commend them for their willingness to bear the attendant discomforts. God forbid that we should be without them! I only pity them for the moral ambiguities with which this participation confronts them; and I hope that at the day of judgment they will be forgiven for whatever troublesome compromises these ambiguities may have forced upon them.
I turned, then, in the fourth chapter, to the way peoples are organized both for the interior processes of government and for interaction with one another on the international scene. I pointed to the relative novelty and the uncertain political-philosophical basis of the modern national state, and questioned its adequacy as the sole recognized form of political independence. I attempted to suggest that the effort to build a formal structure of international relationships exclusively out of a large number of theoretically equal and sovereign national states, ignoring the many and drastic disparities among them, involved too many artificialities to be adequate for the purpose it was designed to serve. I noted that the spirit of modern nationalism, as a form of collective identification for large bodies of people in this modern age, was dangerous stuff, particularly in new countries where people were unaccustomed to the sense of national independence.
Turning to the somewhat puzzling subject of ideology, I gave my reasons for rejecting the Marxist form of it, particularly (but not exclusively) as demonstrated in the extremities of its application in Stalin’s Russia. But I made clear, too, I hope, my doubts about the ultimate validity of any purely materialistic ideological commitment, including even those that inspire the humane European welfare state. With relation to the classic debate about free enterprise versus governmental dirigisme, I took a position squarely in the middle, recognizing that nothing could be worse than an effort by government to “manage” any part of the economic process, but maintaining that there are limits, environmental and otherwise, beyond which free enterprise should not be permitted to go, and that it is the duty of the government to make those limits clear and to insist on their observance. I expressed my skepticism about the values, per se, of economic growth and automation. And I tried, as best anyone could who knows very little about either science or technology, to give an idea as to where these aspects of human thought and activity, in which some profess to see the necessity and possibility of a new and more promising way of looking at many things, find, in a layman’s view, their limits.
The first part of this book, addressed to universal rather than to national realities, represented an effort to call attention to certain congenital imperfections in human nature and to show how these affected, everywhere, the indispensable institutions of government and politics. The focus of the second part of the book was limited to the condition of American society. The views offered were dominated by the author’s impression that the country was in a bad and even critical shape: that there were a number of serious domestic problems with which this government had shown itself unable to cope successfully, and that for this and other reasons the nation’s affairs were seriously out of control. To have such thoughts about one’s own country posed a challenge to the author’s sense of identity. Eccentric as might be the figure he presented on the present national scene—esoteric in its social and cultural origin, slightly dépaysé by the many years spent abroad, and colored by membership in a generation now close to total disappearance—he still thought of himself as an American (what else could he be?) and felt some sense of responsibility in that capacity.
Consideration was given to certain long-term factors which lay heavily on the country’s chances for working itself out of these difficulties. First—its very size. It seemed, looking around the world, that the great countries—the so-called monster countries (the United States, the Soviet Union, China, India, and Brazil)—were problems to themselves even where they were not problems to others. And I had begun to doubt whether the sound principles of American representative government could operate successfully in so great a framework—whether, that is, they did not require, for their successful application, a more intimate geographical setting—a less remote relationship between the ruler and the ruled.
These doubts were reinforced by what I could see of the effects on national problems of the rampant egalitarian currents in American thought. It seemed to me that Tocqueville’s apprehensions about the centralization of political power and about the declining meaning of citizenship for the average citizen were being at least partially borne out by the facts of the present day. The illness of bureaucratization, which Tocqueville also foresaw, was now raging in the federal government and was in many respects out of control.
These evils, it seemed to me, might be diminished if the powers of government could be concentrated in smaller units. The existing states, as they had developed in the years since their establishment, did not seem to me to be adequate for this purpose. Some were too small. Affinities to neighboring areas were sometimes greater than those that prevailed among elements within the same state. State borders did not always coincide with the natural environmental configurations of the country, a factor now daily growing in importance in our political life. These were some of the reasons for my suggestion that the country might be more successfully governed if it were divided into a number of major regions, devoid of the defects just mentioned.
I advanced this suggestion with little hope that it would even be taken seriously within the foreseeable future. The existing political establishment was rooted in the existing federal structure of government. Those who occupied elected positions within that structure, providing as it did the framework for their political success, would be the last ones to approve of extensive changes in it. But I comforted myself with the reflection that in politics, as in science, thoughts do not necessarily have to have a visible immediate utility in order to have value. Seemingly useless discoveries, in which at the time no practical applicability could be discerned, have often ultimately turned out to be the groundwork for useful developments. One is permitted to believe that something of the same might hold true in the political-historical arena.
The two chapters just referred to were followed by one in which the effort was made to show, on two specific examples, how insidious, how deeply rooted, and how unfortunate in their effects were certain of the most widespread and cherished habits—even addictions—of the American population. It was hoped that this exhibit might bring home to some people the realization that if public authority in this country hoped to cope successfully with the nation’s problems, it could not follow the path of least resistance and leave social, cultural, and educational changes exclusively to the workings of the free-enterprise system. It would have to take some interest, at least, in the way people in this country live, in the habits they are developing, and in the effects of all this on the vitality of American society. And this, too, might more easily be accomplished in political entities smaller than the present federal one. Here, while I saw many dangers and a great deal of instability, I saw nothing that could or should prevent us from devising and implementing a far-reaching program of internal reform, along the lines of what I was suggesting.
Before turning to what seemed to be the only possibly hopeful approach to these various problems, I thought it right to take account of the relationship of this country, political and military, to its world environment. It seemed to me that so long as we exhibited such helplessness in the face of our own internal problems, and so long as we continued to suffer from certain congenital limitations of our form of government for the conduct of foreign affairs, there would also be limits on what we could, even at our best, do for the solution of problems beyond our borders. A plea was advanced, therefore, for a modest and relatively self-effacing foreign policy, designed primarily to give us, to the extent world affairs might permit it, the possibility to carry out internal reforms with a minimum of outside interference and distraction. And to accord with this concept, I urged a military policy which, while taking due account of the dangers presented by a highly unstable world environment, would fit with a role in world affairs considerably less ambitious and grandiloquent than that which the experiences of the last half century had led many Americans to take for granted.
In what was said above about the need for internal reform, it was possible to advance only the vaguest suggestions about the direction such reform might take. There could, no doubt, have been other such suggestions, no doubt even better ones. It was clear, in any case, that the details of such changes, in substance and in the means of approach to their realization, were nothing that could usefully flow from the thoughts and pen of any single individual, and particularly of such a one as myself. To have real value, they would have to pass through the filter of many other minds, and preferably some of the wisest, most experienced, most thoughtful, most detached, and most honest that the country could provide.
This filtering was something the country’s political establishment could not provide. That it could not provide it was not a fit subject of reproach to the persons that made it up. Their helplessness in the-respect did not flow primarily from deficiencies of personal character. These, the legislators and the officials, were in this respect no better and no worse than the general run of their constituents. Their helplessness flowed from the situations into which they had been placed by a number of factors: by the obligations they had incurred in order to get elected in the first place; by their extensive dependence on the favor of special-interest groups and on momentary currents of public opinion; by the crushing ponderousness of the bureaucracies by which they were surrounded; by the tempestuous speed of modern electronic communication; by the importunities of constituents and other visitors; by the tyranny of their overflowing in-baskets; and by the intellectual and moral compromises they were compelled constantly to make in order to accomplish anything at all. If, therefore, farsighted but practical ideas were to come forward for moving this country in more hopeful directions, these ideas would have to be from minds and imaginations other than those of the elected legislators and officials. And in such minds and imaginations, the country was not poor. It remained only to find them—and to ask.
From these considerations were derived the ideas I put forward in chapter 11 for an advisory body, a Council of State, to stand at the side of both the executive and the legislative branches of the federal government, to point out for them the changes that were needed in order to put this country on a more hopeful path, and to outline for them the ways one would have to go to accomplish those changes. Unusual as these suggestions may be for much of American opinion (and the writer has no illusions on this score), they were put forward with seriousness and conviction, because the necessity of something along the indicated line was inescapably evident. There was simply no other visible way to go—no other way, at least, that would not undermine the principles on which the American system of government was founded, without which no efforts to improve American life could make any sense at all. There was, in other words, not much that could be done to correct the deficiencies of the official political establishment of the country as we know it today; but one of the things that could be done was to place at its side a voice greatly different from its own; a wise, thoughtful, independent, and detached voice, minatory but constructive, not detracting from the establishment’s powers but loud enough to be heard above all the cacophony of political ambitions.
Are there, reflected in these intellectual efforts, any consistent philosophical principles? I suspect that there are at least some rather basic preferences which, whether one wishes to call them principles or not, are detectable in much of what has been written above. And I shall venture to suggest what some of them might be. There is a preference for the small over the great, particularly in the case of the human political community. There is a preference for the qualitative over the quantitative, for the personal over the impersonal, for the discriminate over the indiscriminate, and for the varied over the uniform, in most major aspects of social life. There is a very decided preference for the effort to distinguish and consider what is real, as distinct from the contrived imagery of reality, in the view contemporaries take of their own civilization. With particular relation to the habits and practices of governments, there is an aversion to the American tradition of the treatment of social and political problems by great, all-inclusive categories (that is, by abstract and rigid legal definitions with theoretically wide-ranging applicability) and a longing for intelligent discrimination in the treatment of both persons and situations, even where this requires that a single public servant be authorized to decide something on his own responsibility. Insofar as ethics come into the picture, there is an emphasis on the importance of a controlled and courteous outward behavior, of manners, and of common decency, as means of redemption from the demonic component in the physiological inner man. Implicit if not explicit in much of the above, there is a wistful plea for recognition of the relative importance of means over ends, not in the sense that foul ends are not reprehensible and unfortunate, but rather that even the noblest ends are likely not to be achieved or, if ostensibly achieved, to be deprived of most of their beneficence, if the means used to achieve them are foul ones. And finally, there is the belief that if we are to have hope of emerging successfully from the great social bewilderments of this age, weight must be laid predominantly upon the spiritual, moral, and intellectual shaping of the individual with a view to the development of his qualities for leadership, rather than on the prospects for unaided self-improvement on the part of leaderless masses. If humanity is to have a hopeful future, there is no escape from the preeminent involvement and responsibility of the single human soul, in all its loneliness and frailty.
These, I reiterate, are some of the lines of philosophical inclination (if one consents to call them that) which seem to the writer to run, like woven threads—here apparent, there concealed—through much of what has been written in this book.
Is it a dark and despairing view of the human predicament that emerges? The writer’s answer is no—it could not be. No one—neither this writer nor anyone else who undertakes to comment on the human scene—can profess to stand outside the subject on which he is commenting. There is no detached Archimedean platform from which the subject could be viewed. Just as the scientist’s observation of an experiment affects the very material on which he is experimenting, the humanist, too, makes himself a part of the problem he examines; and he assumes thereby at least a small share of responsibility for the image he describes. His words, after all, may be expected to have some consequences, however trivial; otherwise, they would not be worth uttering. But the measure and quality of this effect is never predictable; and, that being the case, the responsibility of the writer is all the greater.
I cannot too strongly emphasize the seriousness of this responsibility. If the commentator’s words sow despair, particularly among younger people whose ability to act upon life has not yet exhausted itself or even reached its peak, he may, by his despairing words, have given discouragement where courage was needed. He may have created hopelessness where, even if he could not himself see this, there was no reason not to hope.
And that, as I see it, would be the unpardonable sin. The hour may be late, but there is nothing that says that it is too late. There is nothing in man’s plight that his vision, if he cared to cultivate it, and his will, if he dared to exercise it, could not alleviate. The challenge is to see what could be done, and then to have the heart and the resolution to attempt it. Anything in the way of a comment on the human condition that weakened that heart or undermined that resolution would be an inexcusable abuse of the responsibility of the speaker.
The observations brought forward in this book are offered, then, however severe some of them may seem, with a view to encouraging others to take heart—not to lose it. But to take heart is to act. It is the writer’s hope that this book itself, in its own small way, is an action, and will be received accordingly.